unravelled

W2W, a generator van conversion, photographed in Oxford, 1964. Dave

The wall and gates may be new, but I suspect that the roadway inside is part of the entrance way to the GNR coal depot in Mantle Road at Brockley Dave

Nearly a year on, time for an update. I had a long idle spell after my last post, but then managed a few weeks good progress. During this I compleeted the trial wiring. Those of a nervous disposition should probably look away now... What I have done is bring out all the tortoise, frog and feed connections to the front, where I can make the necessary interconnections. At a later stage I can simplifym and tidy up somewhat. Honest. One of the reasons for the quantity of wires is that I opted to use 4 pole changeover switches for point operation, which with a bit of cunning allows for a degree of non prototypical "interlocking". The intention is to use the spare poles to swich the appropriate controller to the track sections adjacent to the points. In most cases, thee switches operate two pairs of points, or a pair of points and a slip end as a crossover. The tortoise switches can be used for frog polarity, and a spare way, although so far I have found the unifrog work well enough without frog switching. My point butchery to get prototypical spacing caused some problems, but nothing that couldn't be sorted. My biggest problem was with the short crossing scissors arrangement accessing the goods yard. The construction of the flat bottom electrofrog crossing required that the polarities for the bottom left to top right route were opposite to the bottom right to top left one. If both were switched together, I'd have a short circuit between them. My solution was to cross wire the operating switches, so that when one is set, the other switch does nothing. This does mean that if both switches are thrown then one does not match the points, but it works for me. In operation, the fact that there is no noise from the point motors is an alert that something is amiss. All this wiring made me decide to relocate the operating position to the middle of the of the scenic section, and further to have all the ponts for the main station operated from a control panel. I spent some time drawing this up on GIMP. The circles indicate positions of point switches. This will be A4 width, so quite compact. One decision I made was to operate both ends of the top goods yard loop, and half the double slip, together. Looking at it now I'm not sure if that's a good idea. I may have to squeeze in another switch for the right hand end pair of points. The goods yard layout, with the back loop is interesting. At Thame it was changed when the goods yard was widened, to more conventional single ended sidings, but with the lack of space I have, it seemed an interesting arrangement. I'd like to know how this layout would have been worked. One thought is that as wagons/vans had been processed through the goods shed, they could be moved out of the way to the back loop for collection. I'm assuming a shunting horse was on site. On the layout there is not enough room to fit a catch points as shown on the diagram, so I had to resort, with some trepidation, to a bit of Peco butchery, to make this. It s prototypical for at least part of Thame's history, and it fits the space. It still needs a bit of tweaking, and chars replacing, but does the job. The way I made it was to select the places to cut the rails, hopefully leaving emough chairs for good support. Then I cut away the chairs where the rails were to be realigned. Next was what I thought of as the risky bit, cutting the rails. I just used a Xuron cutter, so as to leave the cleaner cut side where the point blade would be fishplated. Then I put a slight bend in the diverging stub rails. The blades were quickly filed up from spare rail, (not very well, I must redo them), and soldered to a copperclad tiebar. All in all I was impressed by how robust the bullhead points are. While they feel a lot more flimsy that their other ranges, they will put up with a lot of abuse. One of the other tasks I have been working on is how to build the platforms. At the moment the plan is to build each face separately on a wooden core. then install them, fill between, and finally fit the platform edging. This is my first real attempt, and I think it shoes promise, as long as I can get the corbelled rows squarer faced, I need to play with scoring to sharpen them up. . However they will be shadowed by the edging, so difficult to see. I just need to keep the camera away. I'm using the brickwork software from Beckenham MRC. Very flexible, if a bit frustrating at times. One blow to modelling. My main source of free card has been discontinued. Lidl have changed their porridge packaging. Fortunately I have built up fairly good stocks of the card already. So that's me up to date for another year... Thanks Dave

They have certainly blocked access to the level crossing from the town side, but I think the other side is in use as an access point I hadn't thought of the crossing as an alternative when the bridge was flooded, rather for occasional vehcles too tall for it. More needed before the bypasses than now. By only digging out one half of the road for the ducts, they maintained works vehicle access under the line. I think there are still services close to the surface on the station side of the road. Once the ducts are in place it should be possible to divert those services while the bridge is open. I would have thought that there is plenty of space to the sides of the road to work on moving services after the road is reopened at its old level.Then the dig out can occur after the new bridge is installed. Dave

I was back in Oxford recently, and took these photos on the 6th of April. I guess they are reinstating the road at the existing level to get traffic moving again, and will dig out to the fimal depth after the new bridge is installed. It looks as if most of the services which were outside the trench at my last visit have now been reburied. As well as the services in individual small (100/150mm) ducts, it looks as if corrugated ducts are being installed for the shallow run services which can be seen in the last photos. Or perhaps the smaller ducts have been run in further corrugated ducts below those vsible. Hopefully there is space in them to future proof the setup too. I do wonder whether it would have been easier to replace the bridge first, and relocate services in the extra space alongside the existing carriageway, which might have allowed light controlled traffic on one lane for most of the work. Dave

I think there may be another Oxford station thread, but I haven't found it, so I am posting here. I was back in Oxford this weekend and made a quick visit to the station to see the works. For now the footbridge makes a good vantage point, and the only two high viz'd people I could see were also there looking at the site. There is one deep excavation of the westbound lane, which seems reasonably dry considering its depth and the rain we've had. I got the impression that they hoped all the surprises had been found, and it will just be a matter of getting on with it when revised plans are agreed.

A mixed bunch Thanks Dave

73068 at Evercreech Junction and Windsor Hill tunnels. Mid 1965 82041 runing round at Binegar, also mid 1965 And at Evercreech, probably November 1965 Dave

Around that date I only saw the hoppers on a couple of occasions, hauled by 56xx 0-6-2T's.

I find that for a lot of emails the message title is enough information, so don't need to open them. Only one group is moaning that I don't read them. Dave

12/5/65. 7920 rescued D1593 somewhere north of Ardley Station. At Adley it was replaced by 6823, presumably sent out from Banbury For those of us interested in such things, the leading vehicle appears to be W111W, a K41 brake. Thanks Dave

Now rails in the towpath. These are long gone, and were on the south bank of the Thames near Crossness. I think they disappeared in the tidying up after the completion of the waste transfer facility, which was then under construction. A scan of NLS shows a possible stretch of unconnected track leading from Belvedere mills (Bovril, disused) on the 1897 map. Some distance upstream, still on the South bank, between Vauxhall and Chelsea bridges, this bullhead rail is seen. Possibly reinforcements for the wall, or fixings for timbers ob the river wall. On the river Lea, an improvised bollard/cleat And finally for tonight, some real rails in the ground. This time at Railway Fields Nature Reserve in Haringey, a repurposed goods yard. Thanks Dave

I did a search on S J & R Stockton, ( I thought Stackton, but Google suggested the correct spelling), and they were making rails for New Zealand's railways in 1874, the date on this gatepost, so would know what a rail looked like for these castings. Incidentally I think it should be read as S J & R of Stockton, as another later supplier was S J R & Co Stockton. Looking again, I can see there is a full stop before Stockton on the casting. For info, a bit found in Graces Guide "The Moor Ironworks, situated upon the west side of the borough, and erected upon land purchased from Messrs Wren, are now in active operation. We take the following description of the works from the Iron and Coal Trades Review : — The proprietors are Messrs Shaw, Johnson and Reay. The works are laid for the manufacture of puddled bars and plates, though the addition of a sheet mill and rail mill is contemplated."

This is a section of bridge rail in a stream, somewhere near Blaenavon, taken a few years ago. There was no sigh of a structure it might have come from And in Brentford, not quite in the road, is a fair length of Barlow rail, being used as a kerb. Also, to add to my erroneous identification more, presumably cast, rail styled posts. This time in the beer garden of the George, in Southwark. There is a railway connection here, as this former coaching in was used by The GNR as a parcels office, as were other coaching inns by other companies. Whether the posts date from then I don't know Thanks Dave

That's interesting, thanks, I will have to reconsider some intended future posts (!). But I have plenty of genuine recycled rail photos to add. Incidentally, are there genuine cases of old rails being cut and reformed like this for neatness? I think that the thing which fooled me is that there looks to be a blobby join at the top. Did they intend to fool people, or did the castings copy an older version where recycled rails were used?